TIS EXCLUSIVE: Congressman King discusses assault

A Colorado resident has been charged with two counts of simple assault and one count of disorderly conduct after he poured a glass of water on Fourth District Congressman Steve King on Friday. Congressman King was having lunch with a group of area leaders at Mineral City Mill and Grill.

“I had a number of meetings over in, and around Fort Dodge yesterday,” King told The Iowa Standard on Saturday. “One of those meetings was to meet with leadership in Fort Dodge.”

King has participated in meetings at Mineral City before. When he arrived on Friday, most of the group was already seated at the table. The group included city and county officials along with some business folks.

There were three tables that seat four people pushed together. With how everyone was already situated, King sat with his back to the rest of the restaurant.

“All the while I was thinking I shouldn’t be sitting here with my back to the room,” King said. “We were carrying on with our discussion and from behind me, I didn’t see him coming at all, and individual came over my right shoulder and he said ‘are you Steve King?'”

“There was no menace in his voice at all. I just said ‘Yes, I am’ in a positive way and I turned to my right and started to raise my hand to shake his hand. This stuff happens every day, it was very routine for me. As soon as I moved my face toward him he had a big glass of cold water and just doused me with that on the side of my face, top of my head, all down my shirt — front and back.”

King said he jumped up and grabbed the perpetrator. Then a couple other guys grabbed him.

“As soon as they had him, I decided it’d probably be best if I let go,” King said. “His mother came over and she started to holler he didn’t do anything. Of course he did and I have the best witnesses that you could possibly have because the mayor was there, city fathers of Fort Dodge were all seated at the table, and everybody saw it from some vantage point and they were all good vantage points.”

The man and his mother wanted to leave the restaurant, but King said that wouldn’t be happening. The man’s mother said she worked for a lawyer and he couldn’t do that.

The man was not allowed to leave. He was held at the front of the restaurant while the police were responding. Once the police arrived, they questioned the man and then took him to the police station.

King said the man had two carry-out meals in his arms in Styrofoam boxes and had them tipped up to hide the glass of water.

“So if I had been looking, I wouldn’t have seen it,” he said. “One of the other individuals also got water on him. When (one of the other individuals) was wrestling him out of that area, he was bitten on the hand by the perpetrator.”

Personnel at Mineral City responded appropriately, King said.

“They did all the things that they could do,” he said. “This was not the fault of anybody in Fort Dodge. All of the people who I dealt with there, save one, conducted themselves in as good of a way as they could have. I’d like to express gratitude to the management and staff at Mineral City and the leadership of Fort Dodge.”

Once it all settled down, the group relocated and finished business.

It is unknown if the man will face federal charges as well.

“I know there’s some evaluation going on now among forces of the United States Attorney on whether to file federal charges for assault,” King said. “He clearly assaulted a federal official during the performance of his duties and there’s a specific law for that. It’s a misdemeanor assault with up to a year in prison.”

Considering the political climate in the country, it would be irresponsible for the government to not send a message to individuals who carry out such behavior.

“If this was about me, it’d be a lot easier just to walk away from,” King said. “But he mentioned to one of the people there that he wanted to be on the national news. This is a message to the entire United States. If we go soft on him here, it puts other members in jeopardy some place else as well as here.”

The media narrative against King is undoubtedly part of the driving force behind the man’s actions.

“There’s no question in my mind that this acrimony that’s generated through social media and the mainstream media is at the foundation of this kind of activity,” King said. “I don’t believe this has ever happened in the state of Iowa. I could be wrong, but I’ve never heard of anything even close to this.”

King was criticized in the media earlier this week for a meme his staff posted on one of King’s Facebook pages. This is the meme that was posted:

The campaign team had encouraged things on the Facebook page to be toned down, but a sense of humor maintained.

“A number of my staff saw that meme and they could not see how it could cause any kind of viral objection,” King said. “It was up for two days before there was any notice of it to speak of.”

The New York Post had something about it late Sunday night and CNN picked it up the next morning.

“Then this whole avalanche started and now all these people are offended because they were told to be offended,” King said.

He said he took it down because it wasn’t worth arguing about.

“I hadn’t seen it. I didn’t know what was in there,” he said. “I can’t say whether I would’ve taken it down if I had seen it. I probably would’ve gone through my younger people who are more sensitive to these. I talked to all of them and they said they didn’t see anything wrong with that. You have a bunch of snowflakes out there who have to hyperventilate.”

The other “controversy” drummed up by the media was King relaying what he was told by a FEMA employee. After a town hall meeting, he said staff told him it went smooth and there wouldn’t be any controversy.

“Then we get this thing where people in the whole state of Louisiana are all offended because I just told a narrative of what a FEMA employee had told me when they were up here helping,” King said. “How bad is our society if we can’t relate those kind of true narratives that objectively identify the difference as illustrated by a FEMA employee who had lived through both?”

King was asked at a different town hall if he thought a white society is superior to a nonwhite society. Some of those who asked questions at that event raised flags already for one particular reason.

At these events, folks are told to write down their questions and then they are called upon to ask them. It’s a pattern that Senator Joni Ernst uses.

“Four or five who came in with their questions typed, and then they didn’t know what their questions were when they were called on,” King said. “They had to ask for their questions back so they could read it.”

National media also just happened to be covering the same town hall. National media has selectively chosen which town halls to cover of King.

“I know CNN is there and of course the New York Times is there and the Democrats all probably knew that was going to happen too,” he said. “The generality and hypothetical of that question is so broad, there’s no answer to that. I just said I didn’t have an answer for that hypothetical, which was too big.”

Last week’s activity seems to just be another week where the Left continues to try to utilize Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals against the only Iowa Republican in the House of Representatives.

Rule 13 from Saul Alinsky says:

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”

It appears isolating King is where the Democrats are in the process. Yet King did about 27 events with the Tanzanian Miracle Children in the same month millions of dollars were being spent calling King a racist.

King raised tens of thousands of dollars and has sponsored three students in Tanzania for a while.

“It’s just kind of hard to take being called a racist all day, every day and into the night while spending time and my money helping those kids,” he said. “All while they’re trying to beat me in an election.”

None of the Republicans running against King have issued a statement to The Iowa Standard’s knowledge regarding the assault that took place in Fort Dodge. Some of his opponents, meanwhile, had issued statements earlier in the week about the meme his staff posted. There also has been no official statement put out by Gov. Kim Reynolds or Senators Charles Grassley or Ernst.